The Roman author Gaius Plinius Secundus (23 - 25 August 79 AD) is usually referred to in English as Pliny, or as Pliny the Elder to distinguish him from his nephew Pliny the Younger [1]. He is best known for his only surviving work, the encyclopedic 37 volume Naturalis Historia (Natural History), written in Latin and published around 77-79 AD, which he dedicated to the newly-crowned emperor Titus (reigned 79-81 AD). This influential work remains an important source for scholars of the ancient history of science and culture.

Pliny the Elder was a biographer, historian, naturalist and natural philosopher, as well as a lawyer, provincial governor and army and naval commander of the early Roman Empire, and a personal friend of Emperor Vespasian (reigned 69-79 AD) and his son and successor Titus. Born in Novum Comum (Como, northern Italy), he was the son of Gaius Plinius Celer, a member of the equestrian order of equites (knights), and his wife Marcella. He never married and had no children. In his will he adopted his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who inherited his estate and considerable wealth.

After his education in Rome, Pliny served as an infantry and cavalry officer in Germania during the reigns of Claudius (41-54 AD) and Nero (54-68 AD), and wrote De jaculatione equestri (Throwing the javelin from horseback), a treatise on the use of the javelin by cavalry. On his return to Rome, around 56-59 AD, he practised as a lawyer and wrote a two-volume biography of his former commander and patron Publius Pomponius Secundus (a poet and author of tragedies, and a brother-in-law of Caligula), and Bella Germaniae (History of the German Wars) in twenty volumes, which was used as a source by the historians Tacitus and Suetonius.

During Nero's "reign of terror", his deposition in 68 AD and the consequent civil war (the Year of the Four Emperors, 69 AD), Pliny kept a low profile, held no public office and wrote on politically safe subjects such as a three-volume educational manual on rhetoric, Studiosus (The student, later divided into six books because of its length), and an eight-volume work on grammar, Dubii sermonis (On doubtful phraseology or Ambiguity in language). None of these works have survived.

When Vespasian became emperor Pliny was appointed as a procurator (governor) of a number of imperial provinces. The number (perhaps four) and locations of his procuratorships are uncertain, but he is known to have governed in Hispania Tarraconensis (northern and eastern Spain) [2], and perhaps Gallia Narbonensis (southeastern France), Africa (north Africa) and Gallia Belgica (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands).

During this period Pliny also added thirty one books to the unfinished Histories by Aufidius Bassus [3]. He did not publish this work, leaving it, as he says in the preface to the Natural History, to his heir Pliny the Younger. He claims he did this to avoid the accusation of ambition, but may have feared that it was too politically controversial.

He probably returned to Rome in 75 or 76 AD, and is thought to have published the first version of the first ten books of the Natural History in 77 AD. He was busy enlarging and revising the work when he was appointed as prefect (commander or admiral) of the fleet at Misenum (Cape Miseno), the largest base of the Roman navy, at the northwest end of the Bay of Naples.

According to the letters of Pliny the Younger [see note 1], he died in his 56th year during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 25 August 79 AD, which destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. He had been staying with his sister and nephew at Misenum, and was preparing to sail to investigate the eruption when he received a plea for help from a friend named Rectina, who with her family was trapped by the catastrophe at their villa at Stabiae, near Pompeii. During the rescue attempt the wind prevented his ship leaving the shore, and he is said to have died as a result of volcanic fumes, although his companions survived.

The final version of the Natural History was published after his death by Pliny the Younger. It is a vast work and a wide-ranging attempt to provide a comprehensive record of contemporary knowledge of the natural world, its resources and their exploitation by humans. Pliny claimed to have been the first Roman to have written such an encyclopedia, and such comprehensive works had previously only been attempted by Greeks.

The fields of natural sciences discussed by Pliny include botany, zoology, anthropology, human physiology, astronomy, geography, geology and mineralogy. He also describes how natural resources [4] such as water, animals, plants, wood, stone and metals are exploited in agriculture, medicine, mining, engineering, building and art. His mentions of ancient painters, sculptors and architects and their works (see below) continue to provide one of the most extensive ancient sources (along with Vitruvius and Pausanias) of information and debate - and often consternation - for historians of Greek and Roman art.

His travels around parts of the empire on his official duties provided him with material for his writing, and several accounts of phenomena, locations, buildings, artworks and events in the Natural History, such as a solar eclipse in Campania in 59 AD (Natural History, Book 2, chapter 72), are thought to be first-hand reports based on his own experiences and observations. However, most of the information in the work is based on books by several earlier authors.

Although the Natural History includes historical surveys of human activities such as sculpture and painting, it is not primarily a work of history. The word "history" in the title is often seen to mean enquiry, in the same way as the Greek title of the Histories of Herodotus also originally meant Enquiries.

The work has survived in around 200 Medieval manuscripts, the earliest dating from the 8th or 9th century, although some passages and abstracts appeared in works from as early as the 3rd century. They contain many errors, corruptions and alterations made by copyists, but no definitive version considered as closest to the original has been identified. The first printed edition was published in Venice in 1469 by Johann and Wendelin of Speyer.

There is no known surviving ancient portrait of Pliny.

Pliny began his Natural history with an attempt to describe or define the world. Like other ancient authors, he used the Latin word mundus, corresponding to the Greek kosmos (κόσμος), sometimes to mean the Earth and its immediate environment, and at other times what we now refer to as the universe. He was aware that the world was a globe spinning in space, and believed that the universe was infinite in size, but also that it had existed and would also exist for all time without beginning or end, and that as a whole it was a deity.

"The world, and whatever that be which we otherwise call the heavens, by the vault of which all things are enclosed, we must conceive to be a Deity, to be eternal, without bounds, neither created, nor subject, at any time, to destruction. To inquire what is beyond it is no concern of man, nor can the human mind form any conjecture respecting it. It is sacred, eternal, and without bounds, all in all; indeed including everything in itself; finite, yet like what is infinite; the most certain of all things, yet like what is uncertain, externally and internally embracing all things in itself; it is the work of nature, and itself constitutes nature.

It is madness to harass the mind, as some have done, with attempts to measure the world, and to publish these attempts; or, like others, to argue from what they have made out, that there are innumerable other worlds, and that we must believe there to be so many other natures, or that, if only one nature produced the whole, there will be so many suns and so many moons, and that each of them will have immense trains of other heavenly bodies. As if the same question would not recur at every step of our inquiry, anxious as we must be to arrive at some termination; or, as if this infinity, which we ascribe to nature, the former of all things, cannot be more easily comprehended by one single formation, especially when that is so extensive. It is madness, perfect madness, to go out of this world and to search for what is beyond it, as if one who is ignorant of his own dimensions could ascertain the measure of any thing else, or as if the human mind could see what the world itself cannot contain.

That it has the form of a perfect globe we learn from the name which has been uniformly given to it, as well as from numerous natural arguments. For not only does a figure of this kind return everywhere into itself and sustain itself, also including itself, requiring no adjustments, not sensible of either end or beginning in any of its parts, and is best fitted for that motion, with which, as will appear hereafter, it is continually turning round; but still more, because we perceive it, by the evidence of the sight, to be, in every part, convex and central, which could not be the case were it of any other figure.

The rising and the setting of the sun clearly prove, that this globe is carried round in the space of twenty-four hours, in an eternal and never-ceasing circuit, and with incredible swiftness. I am not able to say, whether the sound caused by the whirling about of so great a mass be excessive, and, therefore, far beyond what our ears can perceive, nor, indeed, whether the resounding of so many stars, all carried along at the same time and revolving in their orbits, may not produce a kind of delightful harmony of incredible sweetness. To us, who are in the interior, the world appears to glide silently along, both by day and by night."

He goes on to discuss the elements, the heavens, with its planets, stars and constellations, and God...

Pliny the Elder, Natural history, Book 2, chapters 1-3. At Perseus Digital Library.

The notes to this edition discuss at length some of the concepts used by Pliny, with reference to other writers such as Plato and Aristotle.